Rome, 11 Oct. (Adnkronos) – The Festival of Statistics and Demography, promoted by the Italian Society of Statistics (SIS), the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and the Statistical Society “Corrado Gini”, dedicates the StatisticAllYoung format to a rich and varied program dedicated to children and young people. In this year's edition, now the tenth, the key to understanding is the encounter between statistics and Europe, which sees young people as increasingly prominent figures. During the four days of the Festival, from 17 to 20 October, in the Gaming space in Piazza dei Signori, you can take a tour of Europe in 80 statistics: pedaling on an exercise bike, young people's knowledge of Europe will be tested. A virtual journey through the countries of the European Union in 10 stages: for each stage, a statistic relating to one of the 27 EU countries is proposed and participants will have to decide whether the data is true or false.
On the mornings of October 17, 18 and 19, Piazza dei Signori will be transformed into an open-air classroom, where numbers come to life and creativity becomes the tool for exploring official statistics. A unique opportunity to touch the data with your own hands and discover statistics as a fundamental and transversal tool for exploring the contents of other disciplines. Statistical skills, or the ability to collect and reason about data and the ability to find solutions to problems that may be encountered, are, in fact, among the necessary baggage for developing a critical sense appropriate to the context in which we live.
The primary school students involved in Demografia in cnuccia transform themselves into “detectives of demography” and investigate the slow evolution of the country's population with ruler, scissors, straws and official statistics: they get to work to build the age pyramid. In addition, hands-on, they learn the main statistical measures with the Bickering between sisters Moda, Median and Median.
The Pigreco ti stimo! workshop is instead aimed at middle school students, leading them to discover this fascinating number whose value is estimated by the participants with a deck of cards, two dice and a coin. In Homer was a statistician Pop! we start from the Catalogue of ships of the Iliad, where Homer, with a detail comparable to a statistical table, describes the number of contingents of the Achaean army, the commanders, the number of ships and, sometimes, the men on board.
For older students, secondary school students, the laboratory Paese che vai… statistica che trovi, in collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia, explores, starting from the first official data dating back to 1876, collected in the Statistical Yearbook of Italian Emigration, the stories of Italians who left their homeland to seek fortune elsewhere. In the laboratory Demography in Europe, the European demographic issue is addressed on the basis of official statistical sources. In the challenge to the last question of How much do you know about Europe?, the data describing our and other European countries are discovered through a game.
Statistics also comes to life in the Statistical Comic, Garagulp! Thanks to Valentino Villanova, illustrator, and Fred Dalla Rosa, scriptwriter, the adventures of Alex Dream return for the third time with a completely statistical theme. The new episode, entitled The Irrelevance of Differences, uses official statistics data to address issues of gender equality in a creative and engaging way. The project is the result of collaboration between Banca Prealpi SanBiagio, the National Institute of Statistics and the Statistical Society "Corrado Gini", the numbers become, in the laboratory Drawing Statistics with Alex Dream, protagonists of adventurous and educational stories for young people.
Also in Piazza dei Signori, the Pop va in Europa laboratory tells the story of the territory through the data of official statistics and the Permanent Census, going beyond the national borders of Istat to discover the information heritage of Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the EU. The mathematician and science communicator Giorgio Dendi, known for his talent as a puzzler and blogger, fascinates the public with his charm and presents the Play and Learn with Statistics laboratory, dedicated to children and families: he guides participants in the discovery of the art of percentages, highlighting some calculation and interpretation errors.
On Saturday 19 October, in the afternoon, the workshops dedicated to teachers #Istatperlascuola and Il censo sui banchi di scuola, present the main Istat initiatives to promote statistics in the classroom with practical ideas and suggestions from a Stem perspective. The workshop dedicated to AI and, in particular, to large-scale linguistic models (Large Language Models, LLM), which have revolutionized the way we collect, analyze and communicate data, could not be missed. The event Discovering Generative Artificial Intelligence: a (European) journey into AI for Official Statistics (Piazza dei Signori) is designed for the youngest but is open to everyone. Mauro Bruno, Istat researcher, explores some cases of application of LLMs to official statistics.
The Riccati-Luzzatti State Technical and Economic Institute of Treviso renews its valuable collaboration with StatisticAllYoung. The students of the institute, in the role of Stat Buddy, guide the youngest in the design of a questionnaire and in the analysis of the collected data. They are at their side in the transformation of the answers into frequency tables and graphs, offering the necessary skills to interpret and present the results in a clear and accurate way. The laboratory Statistici in erba crescere, therefore, represents an engaging opportunity for middle school students to approach statistics thanks to the support of the most experienced.
In addition, the Institute's computer labs host secondary school students, who can move Discovering the Istat site and explore the essential point of reference for those who produce and use statistical data. Navigating among the 152 indicators of the 12 domains of the Bes - Fair and Sustainable Well-being dashboard becomes an exciting game in the Indicator Hunt and easily allows you to have a picture of the state of health of our country that goes beyond GDP. Finally, students have the opportunity to prepare for the individual competitions of the Italian Statistics Olympics 2025 with practical exercises with the spreadsheet.
The nursery school students, guests of the Treviso Campus – Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Aula Accoglienza, access from Piazza Università), are trying their hand at a workshop created in collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia: art, statistics and a pinch of probability meet thanks to the myth of Kapewë Pukeni, known as “The Alligator Bridge”, which tells the story of the passage from the Asian continent to the American one across the Bering Strait and the subsequent separation between the lands and the peoples.
Istat also comes to the library to bring young people closer to the world of data, offering informative, fun and engaging scientific activities aimed at schools, children and families. In BRaT, the Children's Library of Treviso, with the support of the students of the single-cycle master's degree course in Primary Education Sciences at the University of Padua, in the guise of Stat Buddy, statistics turns into a fairy tale and guides even the littlest ones to discover the treasure hidden in the data. In Sisters' Bickering Fashion, Media and Mediana struggle to agree on which variable - color, size, weight - to use to organize a set of t-shirts. While in 10, 100, 1000 Moonlit Nights, Ada defeats the Saputona witch thanks to the law of large numbers. In The Rain Peacock, expressing personal feelings of uncertainty about a future event becomes very easy with the help of the peacock's feathers. The greedy Fruit-Eating Whale teaches how to organize data into pictograms to discover your favorite fruit. If it is true that “The beauty of being a statistician is that you can play in everyone else's backyard”, as the American mathematician JW Tukey said, it is even more true that, at the Festival of Statistics and Demography, you can learn about statistics while playing and having fun.